Crafting With Consciousness

Tag Archives: Inspiration

Just popping in to say hi, so hi. It’s super late here, but I’m feeling really inspired right now and I don’t want to ruin it with sleep. Maybe that’s not particularly healthy reasoning, but I’m running with it. I’ve been making tons of lists lately, so I thought I’d make a list of what’s inspiring me right now:

1. Lists. Okay, this might sound weird, but I’m a total list person. It’s funny, because I have awful time management and I’m not organized, but I really like lists. I’m a walking contradiction. I have started taking a notebook with me everywhere full of lists. I have my to do list which I just continually add to and cross things off, but then I also have lists for blog ideas, craft ideas, and all kinds of other things. It’s really helping me straighten out the ideas from the jumbled mess in my head. (In case you’re wondering, I’m totally the kind of person who, if I do something not on my list, put it on my list after and cross it off. If you do this too, know that you are not alone, and I think it’s perfectly acceptable behavior).

2. Books. When I was younger, I was a total bookworm. I would stay up all night reading a book, I would juggle like 5 books at a time (I’m a tad bit insane), and I tore through books. Through high school I would have spurts of reading tons of books, and then times when I really wouldn’t read that much. Since starting college, I haven’t read for pleasure AT ALL. I take pretty much all liberal arts classes that require hundreds of pages of reading a week, and I’m usually so sick of reading by the end of the week that doing it for pleasure sounds about as fun as getting a tattoo on my eyeball (In case you’re wondering, I have NO desire to get a tattoo on my eyeball). This summer I promised myself that I would read 5 books. I felt like I was watching waaaaay too much TV and I could feel my brain turning to mush. These last few weeks I have been back to my bookworm ways and I’m loving it. I’m planning on doing some posts on the books I’ve been reading.

3. A Beautiful Mess. I have a little bit of an obsessive personality, and when I find something I like, be it a blog or a television show or a podcast, I want to see it from the beginning. I’ve been following A Beautiful Mess for a while now, and it’s in my top 3 blogs, I absolutely love it. I decided to go through the archives and read it from the beginning. It’s kind of a weird but wonderful experience. You see people’s lives almost in fast forward. They might write once a day, but if I’m reading the archives I usually read at least a month in one sitting. It’s amazing to see the changes and evolution of people this way. Seeing Elsie’s creative process and the evolution of her business has been amazing and really helpful in thinking about where I want to go. Also, the idea of becoming a prolific creator by staying constantly inspired and just making thing all the time has really stuck with me.

4. Setting goals. This is connected with reading A Beautiful Mess and the lists. See? Everything is connected. Elsie is amazing at setting goals for herself, which is something I’ve never really thought about. I’ve started setting goals, and so far so good. I set summer goals and they’ve been going really well. I’m starting to think about what my goals will be for the school year.

5. Actually doing projects that I plan to. I have a huge list of projects that I want to make, and I rarely cross things off that list. Yesterday I did a project that has been on my list for a long time (I’ll share it hopefully tomorrow) and not only was it amazing to make, but it gave me so much motivation. I just felt a surge of forward motion after finishing it.

6. I was talking to my dad the other night as I was working on a project, and he was trying to antagonize me (as he often does), asking along the lines of why I didn’t just buy what I was making. He was just kidding, but it allowed me to talk a bit about what creativity is to me. Creating has always been really important to me, but it has recently taken over a much larger portion of my life, and I now understand that it is a vital part of me, I HAVE to create. I told him that part of it is about the fight against mass production, but that’s just a small thing. Part of it is the final product, although that’s not so important to me right now. Part of it is tapping into the history of crafts and what it means to be a craftsperson. These are obviously not that well thought out ideas and there’s more to it than those things, but I’m really interested in this topic. I think that I will work on flushing these ideas out, and write about what creativity is to me or how it affects my life or something like that.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings and I hope you are all feeling as inspired as I do.

I have a confession… I am a link-sender. I send many many links and videos and pictures to friends and family, and I’m not one of those kind, relaxed link senders. I’m like ‘have you read it? how about now?….now? You’re killing me! Watch the goddamn video I sent you asshole. ‘ (thankfully, that’s the […]